Creative Technologies

Another Time.

The biggest concern of my lecturer regarding my team’s work is that maybe we are still circumnavigating the problem and not hitting it directly.

The main problem is that we think we are being fluid because we are changing the final thing.

Our project is helping particularly year ones in BCT, like an icebreaker, focusing on a topic, opening conversations with a visual representation of people talking and show who is contributing, talking too much and not enough. With the topic of stories that we provide to them, so they have a topic to discuss rather than discuss themselves because even if we are not talking about ourselves our answers to certain things especially open-ended question says a lot about us that other people can perceive.

Initially, it being a mobile phone app allowed me to start on making a phone up but then I found out that the level of accuracy I want can’t be found on a microphone on a phone and since it is not precise there are a lot of discrepancies from brand to brand even phone to phone.

During our presentation to the class, some people asked that wouldn’t it be a bad to have such a small screen with the indicator to show people talking and people could miss it if they are paying attention to the person over the phone.

We then changed to a computer Processing release with me doing most of the coding with my partner doing the design part. We ran another problem facing the issue of multiple mic inputs in the computer and the input cost as little as $300. Naturally, we are incredibly rich students and only decided not to buy it because we don’t want to, but this still caused us problems. We needed to change again because there is another technological roadblock in front of us.

We had to ask ourselves, what is the core idea of our project, what is malleable and what is constant features that our final project to have. Since we discovered another problem that is hard to overcome we needed to go almost back to the drawing board. We talked to the TA that we had and helped us one more time. Asked us to question our actual idea for the project. He asked us that if we are still having problems then maybe it is time to transform the original idea to not necessarily simpler but to something more accessible for the people making it, us, and for the people receiving the final product.

Now we evolve the initial question to suit the environment that we have observed and that we have found ourselves in. So we looked at the question of helping the students to identify the people who are contributing a lot, too much and not enough. Asked if it is feasible, found that microphone are fickle things.

So we transformed the heading of our project one last time and headed in focusing in the area of visual representation of a conversation about a particular topic that sits in the people to use the device. The people input a topic they want to discuss and then the screen creates a small bubble with the topic in the middle. A mic picks up the conversation and detects the level of sound and then adds to the diameter of the circle making it bigger. When the user’s press back to the overall view they can create more topics and connecting them and seeing visually what they talked about the most and the least. They can come back to it connect bubbles and see where the growth is.

This is the current goal and I am trying to get the function by this coming Monday.

The reason for this switch is due to the fact now looking back at it, it feels like I was always getting ahead of myself, I act as early as I would have liked when I was presented with live problems I have encountered on my way here. I learned that nothing is exact, from the format of the final outcome to the idea. That doesn’t mean starting over, but things can change, and it should be considered good and not a hindrance, even if it is not a nice feeling to know you almost wasted your time putting effort into one thing to be changed in the end.